Scott MacStravic, Ph.D.
When I began my career in health care marketing, I was often the first to introduce the notion that there were two different ways the organization could balance its budget each year: 1) cutting costs to match expected revenue; or 2) increasing revenue to match expected costs. Naturally, this was a self-serving as well as organization-serving notion, since it pointed out the way that marketing could be of greatest benefit to the organization, and how it could be accountable for its benefit.
Of course, by “selling” the idea of marketing in this way, I found that my services – as consultant, then as marketing executive – tended to be judged entirely on their financial ROI. The best I could do was to argue that in many cases, the “return” should be gauged over more than one year, even though the “investment” was usually the combination of the marketing department’s total costs in overhead, and the “marginal” costs of particular campaigns, in only the years that the investment was made.
